Putting the Ever… In Evernote

Image from: Randy Elrod In our ever changing world where the next great idea seems to be yesterday’s old news, it’s refreshing to see a company that offers true value persevere. Last week Evernote raised 70 million dollars in a Series D round of funding that will help ensure they continue to thrive and gives their users security in knowing their “notes” will remain accessible for years to come. As

In our ever changing world where the next great idea seems to be yesterday’s old news, it’s refreshing to see a company that offers true value persevere. Last week Evernote raised 70 million dollars in a Series D round of funding that will help ensure they continue to thrive and gives their users security in knowing their “notes” will remain accessible for years to come.

As a long-time user of Evernote this news has provided me some inner peace as only last September I became frustrated when Google Notebook announced it would be ending its similar service. This news meant I needed to reorganize all the content I had saved to Google Notebook which was counterproductive to the concept of using an organization tool like this in the first place. Truth be told, I should have just stuck to using Evernote from the beginning, but I decided to use the Google service for two main reasons. First, while Evernote made it easy to save content found online along with other manually entered notes, I found it very difficult to organize the content in any order other than the by the date in which it was entered; whereas Google Notebooks allowed me to move notes within a Notebook in an order that made more logical sense. The second reason was a belief that Google would come out ahead and leave the competition behind them, as they had done several times before.

With the news of Google Notebook shutting down, I quickly went back to using Evernote as my keeper of records. After all, my first note dates back to July of 2005 (3 years before Evernote launched its Beta version). And luckily Evernote made the task of migrating the content in my Google Notebooks much easier than anticipated with the help of their GoogleNotebookimportfunctionality.

Now with Google Notebook out of the way, the question remains…. Is Evernote the best option to organize my notes, web clippings, and just about everything else moving forward? With 25 million users and over 1 million premium service members, it would appear that Evernote is the clear leader in their space today. However, diigo, a social bookmarking tool that has recently been expanding its services to include note taking appears to be their closest competitor as no other service comes close to attracting the same amount of visitors these two services are.

The one clear take away is that Evernote is not going away any time soon. And since its Series C funding last year, Evernote has made several acquisitions including Hello, an app designed to help you remember people you meet and Skitch which helps annotate images. My hope is that with this new round of funding they explore a way to incorporate a Task List Manager in the spirit of David Allens – Getting Things Done, as a way of making all the notes saved more actionable, instead of turning years of saved content into an Elephant graveyard – where once interesting content goes to die.